A Playful Approach – Eike König and his graphic crèche
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Graphic designer Eike König and his team love surprises. König is the manager of a Hort (crèche), although he is not in fact a childcare professional. He even called his creative centre, which was founded in 1994 in Frankfurt, “Eikes grafischer HORT” (Eike’s graphic crèche) in the early days. In doing so, the former art director of a record label ruled out any confusion with children’s nurseries – and at the same time set the tone for his work and the way the team of designers works together: the approach is intended to be playful, creative and open at this new playground for illustrators.
König has now been in Berlin with an international team since 2007 and his creative centre in Kreuzberg is simply known as HORT nowadays. You don’t need to say any more than that either, because HORT has become a brand that is as well-known in the scene as the labels for which they have already developed campaigns and designed illustrations. Walt Disney is amongst them and also Nike, for whom HORT took on the new shoes belonging to basketball superstar LeBron James and created the sales campaign to go with them. Further clients include Neon, the German magazine for young adults, for which HORT regularly produces illustrations, as well as Volkswagen, IBM and Microsoft. Well-known brand
The fact that Eike König, who previously spent a long time working and designing in the manageable industry of record labels for electronic music, now frequently works for international customers and large companies, only seems contradictory for a moment.
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As König found out, firms such as Nike are less worried about hiring a small agency from Germany to conduct a large-scale marketing campaign in the USA than German companies would be. “Nike for instance gave us a free rein. We didn’t have to keep attending meetings or spend a long time working our way up through the various departments to start with, as is often the order of the day in Germany.”
“Taking a bird’s eye view”
The confidence that international companies have in HORT’s creative power is all the more unusual from a German perspective when you look at their working method. It is indeed fundamentally different to that of a classic advertising agency or another design service provider. First of all König gives his team total freedom to approach the topic, brand or task. “Professionalism aside”, says König, “design needs a playful approach, a lightness.” And it wouldn’t be possible to find that if how something is supposed to look has already been specified in advance.
So to start with the customer as instructing party shifts into the background, the team is even supposed to detach itself as far as possible from their expectations: “Taking the bird’s eye view” is what König calls this important approach phase. Nobody in his team needs to fear making mistakes in this phase, because König also defines his HORT as a refuge. “A proper crèche is after all supposed to be a place of protection and a playground for children, and here we are trying to be a sort of playground for creative people.” There are only a few rules in this place, but they are important to the boss: “No clichés, no advertising with naked women or for alcohol and cigarettes.” Other than that only one rule applies: “Surprise me” is what König hopes for from his team. |
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Hip-hopper in a new guise
But the team achieves all kinds of surprises, not only with respect to König, but the entire HORT regularly pulls off surprises for customers and the public. König recently had a particularly big one to offer German music lovers: he completely reinvented the nationally renowned hip-hopper Sido’s image on behalf of Universal Music, and to do this was the first to remove his trademark, a martial mask made of metal. Then Sido himself, his signature and his new record cover were visually shifted into the Berlin of the 1920s – complete with spectacles, suit and jaunty Charleston dancers.
König, who still enjoys working for and with the music scene and frequently does so, has focused intensively on hip-hop and its codes and assures that this will crop up in the new campaign, even if they never quite gained control of Sido’s overall image. |
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New Corporate Design for the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation
A much more traditional brand in Germany will soon be presented in similarly redesigned form, because a further surprise from the HORT stable is on its way, primarily aimed at the cultural community in Germany – the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has commissioned the creative artists to find and develop a new Corporate Design for their company. The result is a “clear departure from the historical Bauhaus canon of forms”, as HORT puts it. Based on the Courier, Arial Black and Arial Narrow fonts, it is not supposed to historicise or ironise the Bauhaus image, but to be perceived neutrally as part of today’s museum culture in Germany. Admittedly, says König, there will of course be a reference to Bauhaus, even though he doesn’t think that the overall result will resemble “the way Bauhaus is fixed in people’s minds.” He is already looking forward to the discussions about the new layout: “There might be an outcry at first, but after that it becomes all the easier to get the dialogue going.”
Iris Braun
is a freelance journalist and author who lives in Berlin. Translation: Jo Beckett Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Online-Redaktion February 2011 Any questions about this article? Please write to us!  online-redaktion@goethe.de |
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